Art in Society

Art and (Sustainable) Society Re-Mix: An exercise in building a course using transmedia pedagogy

John Fenn, Assistant Professor, University of Oregon

Doug Blandy, Professor, University of Oregon

AAD 450/550: Art and Society is a required course for the Masters Degree in Arts Management at the University of Oregon. 2010 is our third year to co-instruct the course, as well the year in which our program introduced WordPress MU into the graduate program as a platform for student learning portfolios (among other things). In order to invigorate the course, we decided to re-mix it in a way that would take advantage of the participatory learning afforded by WordPress. Applying Jenkins (2006) conception of convergence culture as the intersection of audience participation in contemporary media creations and the notion of transmedia as stories being told / circulated in a variety of new and old media formats to an educational context, we set about implementing a participatory / transmedia pedagogy in our re-mix. Finally, we wanted to develop the course in such a way that it would be informed by the concept of “sustainability”—rather broadly and vaguely defined. Our intention here was to underscore that any definition of sustainability should include “culture” along with the environmental, political, and economic factors that undergird society.

The remix of this class took place over the course of an academic year, with much of the heavy-lifting occurring across the two terms preceding the offering (Spring 2010). Core questions guiding our remix included:

What is a participatory pedagogy?

What is transmedia pedagogy?

What is the relationship between the two?

What literacies are engaged / emergent in each domain?

How can course activities, including assignments, be designed to  support a participatory and/or transmedia pedagogy?

What are the affordances of various media (including legacy/historicized media) within a participatory/transmedia pedagogy?

How should learning styles be considered within a participatory / transmedia pedagogy? What are the benefits/drawbacks for specific media in relationship to learning styles?

In what way does the content of Art and Society—art, culture, material culture—serve as a modality of mediation/media practice, such that the participatory / transmedia pedagogy and the content map onto each other?

How can the course be facilitated so that students can use existing research and critical skills while simultaneously acquiring skills associated with participatory culture and transmedia pedagogy such as appropriation, collective intelligence, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation across multiple theoretical and cultural perspectives?

How can we as the instructors work in partnership with our students to compile a text for the course that emerges over the course of the term and is consistent with participatory / transmedia pedagogy? What digital tools and social networks can be used to facilitate this process?

Preliminary and/or partial answers to some of these questions catalyzed our planning and building process. During weekly face-to-face meetings focused on operationalizng the course remix, we debriefed (and sometimes debated) work we had done asyncrhonously via Google Wave (then a brand new tool…). Wave provided a platform for brainstorming, editing, collecting, and organizing the course; significantly, it also provided a form of meta-documentation that captured process in an unfolding stream. This was not always elegant—and entailed a learning curve differentially experienced by both of us—but ultimately it was a rewarding mechanism for collaborative structuring of the course. You can view the Wave we used here.

We invite you take a look at those sections of the course that are open to public view; in order to abide by fair use standards as well as concerns over student privacy, we have password protected some sections of the WPMU course site.  You can access the blog stream, the assignment guidelines, the syllabus, as well as the blog roll; use either the links or the navigation bar at the top of this site. You can also see tags from our course Diigo group, and a snapshot of the latest postings to that group. This resource proved to be extremely rich and engaging for all involved in the class, but ultimately we decided to make the group “closed” to people outside of the class. This decision—alongside a few other technical/pedagogical choices we made—illustrate that the transmedia pedagogy we pursued is not completely “open” at this point (or in this iteration), but we believe that such limitations should be read in light of the transparency and attention to process our experiment reveals.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 28th, 2010 at 9:33 am and is filed under course info, Spring 2010 (30708). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.